O'Dwyer

While teaching a class on coarse-graining methods in physics, James O’Dwyer realized that the technique could be used to understand how microbes evolve over time. The results, published in PNAS, reveal microbial family trees with distinct evolutionary patterns that may one day help us understand how harmful microbes evolve.

Inspired by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, collaborators from the University of Illinois and National University of Singapore improved a 35-year-old ecology model to better understand how species evolve over decades to millions of years.